NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

Post by brokenmachine » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 3:17 AM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #18

mtgx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One last time. > Since at least May 2016, the surveillance agency had featured honesty as the first of four “core values” listed on NSA.gov, alongside “respect for the law,” “integrity,” and “transparency.” The agency vowed on the site to “be truthful with each other.” Also, I'm thinking they should probably remove all of these, if they were truly honest with us. Respect for the law? Come on. They've been constantly…

I feel like removing it completely would fail to capture the partial truth. Perhaps replace "respect for law" with "respect for authority"?

Post by jpetso » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 6:00 AM UTC

jpetso wrote: post #92

criley2 wrote: post #35

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As a taxpayer, I find the entire idea that the NSA pretended to be for honesty and openness to be funny. What's next, the CIA is about hope and change? As a taxpayer I accept that the NSA is the SIGINT side of America's spyforce, while the CIA is more of the HUMINT side of our spyforce. The entire idea that the techie side of our spyforce claimed to care about "openness and honesty" is rather absurd and hilarious in…

As a taxpayer, I'd like to see HUMINT continued and supported. However, SIGINT deserves nothing less than a full (and orderly) shutdown.

Post by cmurf » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

randcraw wrote: post #149

cmurf wrote: post #136

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This is silly. The DNI takes an oath to keep state secrets a secret. He then takes an oath to tell the truth to Congress in an open session, which is itself an oxymoron when discussing a huge bulk of the national intelligence apparatus because we demand so much secrecy around every damn thing. How do you have an open session and not pretty much immediately invite some sort oath violation? It's the dumbest fucking thi…

It's common practice for anyone called to testify before congress to request a closed session if they believe their testimony will violate their oath of secrecy. Clapper did not. Instead he testified before open congress and lied, which was unnecessary, unless he was guilty of the charges in question -- knowingly directing NSA staff to spy on Americans, which the NSA's charter explicitly disallows. Therefore Clapper…

Post by cmurf » Thu, Jan 25, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #156

cmurf wrote: post #155

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[flagged]

This degree of incivility is a bannable offence on Hacker News regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please don't do this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Post by merpnderp » Mon, Jan 29, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

cmurf wrote: post #125

merpnderp wrote: post #84

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James Clapper lies to senate intelligence committee and is outed only days later. On March 13th the statue of limitations runs out on prosecuting this crime. This data is misused and no one is punished, even for the overtly blatant crimes.

This is specious, and exposes deep naiveté about the law as well as protocol at hearings. The director was put into the position of either lying to Congress or disclosing state secrets. Insofar as the law is concerned, exposing state secrets is a far worse offense. That's just the way it works, and if you don't like it, this particular instance isn't the moment to get into a pissing contest about what public policies…